Months dragged on slowly by. As an adult, I remember feeling as though time moved quickly. I remember being surprised by the Holiday seasons suddenly being upon me, or by summer breaks being over before they'd truly felt like they'd begun. I remember weeks flying by as I struggled to keep up with grading as well as my own writing assignments for graduate school. I remember lamenting the loss of my youth, and how time seemed to stretch forever when I was younger.
I regret that now. Days last years. Now that I'm two years old, I have been moved into my own private bedroom. I have a tiny little bed shaped like a racecar. A short and squat little dresser that I suppose is meant to teach and encourage me to organize my own clothes and dress myself. There's a toy chest that I've never really bothered with, and a tall closet with a child lock that's laughably easy to open.
There's also a child safety mechanism over the top of my bedroom doorknob, meant to keep me in my room. It doesn't work. I just have to reach up and tun it, placing my fingers in the correct places to properly grasp the knob. Perhaps it would present more of a challenge to an actual toddler.
In my boredom, I've taken to wandering the Manor by myself, finding humor in the panicking maids and nanny as they realize, on an almost hourly basis, that they can't find me. My favorite place is my mother's room because that's where all the good books are. At first, I tried the library, but all there is in there are the classics – which I have already read – or else encyclopedias and reference books and almanacs and compendiums on random subjects I don't care about. It's very aesthetically pleasing to look at, but very boring to peruse.
But my mother had wide bookshelves lining every wall in her rooms. There are figurines of anime characters, some that I recognize but most that I do not. There are entire series of manga and manwha. There is every kind of light novel imaginable. It's all divided up by genre: isekai, BL, GL, Wuxia, Slice of Life, Mystery, Historical, Fantasy. The colorful books made the rooms look cozy and exciting at the same time. My mother had comfortable, plush chairs and even a window seat. This room was across the hall from my parent's bedroom, and so I had to be very careful not to wake them during my nightly ventures into the magical room. But it was worth the trouble.
And, being two, the few times that I was caught I was hardly given more than a frown and light swat to the diaper.
Speaking of the diapers, I was still being put in them, despite now being old enough to finally have control over my bodily functions. For the past many months, I'd been using a regular toilet. Once again, this is something that normally no one would appreciate. But after being forced to defecate in my own pants for over a year, this accomplishment was accompanied by a strong rush of relief. Still, I needed a booster stair to reach the toilet seat, but I managed, nevertheless.
But I digress.
Finally, being able to speak was its own flavor of freedom. Now, I was able to say simple sentences without having to worry too much about how my family would react. They were all just too relieved that I'd stopped cursing. For the most part.
"Mother," I said with only the slightest lisp that I was desperately trying to train myself out of. "I'm bored." Mother smiled at me and patted me on the head.
"Why don't you go play with your cousin?" She asked me.
"He's a baby," I replied, drily. "He can't play with me, yet."
"Well," she said, looking amused. "What about Clark?"
I rolled my eyes, much to my mother's visible amusement. "Clark's boring."
"Hey!" my cousin protested from where he sat at the kitchen breakfast bar, perched on a stool. He was working on his homework, looking slightly frazzled. "I'm not boring! You're boring because you're a baby, too!"
"No," I told him archly. "I'm a toddler. Help me up," I told him, reaching out my arms towards him. My mother watched in fond silence as Clark put me on the stool next to him.
"Don't let him fall," she warned, looking like she was getting ready to walk around the counter and hold on to me herself.
"I won't" Clark responded airily. He then bent his schoolbook in my direction. "See, I'm not boring. My school is."
"That's easy," I scoffed. "You should be done with it by now. You're taking so long." I meant to only tease, but my cousin's eyebrows were raised so high they were about to fly off his face. And my mother no longer looked amused, simply surprised. Whoops. Should probably dial it back. Damn. It was hard to remember that I was still a toddler now that I had much of my bodily autonomy back.
Oh well. Might as well go for broke. Curious for as to how my family would react, wondering if this was still within the realm of believable child genius, I took Clark's pencil from him. What he was struggling so much with was basic algebra. It took less than five minutes to fill out the work sheet spread before me. Clark's eyes kept getting wider. Mother wasn't smiling. Gulping, I held the pencil back out to my cousin.
"There you go," I told him. "Let's go read, now."
"You can read?" Clark said in surprise. "You read that! You- you can count?" He looked from me to my mother.
Over the course of the past several months, I'd slowly been working my way up from only saying "Fuck" – that lasted a good week because it didn't stop being funny – to using one or two repeated words over and over. "Please" and "no" being the most useful at the time. Then, I limited myself to three-word sentences, bending grammar to stay within those confines. It became something of a game, how much could I infer in as few words as possible. In fact, for an entire month, I began communicating primarily in shrieks and grunts, experimenting with how easy or difficult it was to get my point across.
Slowly, I'd worked my way up to grammatically correct sentences. These were punctuated by stubborn, seemingly-noncomprehensive wide eyed stares and silence. Then, I started to speak as I normally would. This progression lasted a pain-staking year or so, and I felt like I deserved the reward of talking like a sentient being.
Then there were those moments where I was caught out of bed at night, holed up in my mother's room with a book. A couple of those times, I was cooed over for pretending to read. Though, as time went on, I could see the suspicion and perception in my mother's eyes, even if my father was unable to see past how cute I was.
Speaking of my father, he'd never stopped consulting his child psychologist friends. He told them about my mental and physical development, and some of them suspended their belief until they saw me with their own eyes. Though my father refused to allow them to perform tests, he did occasionally bring them to the house to observe me. How I reacted to them depended on my mood. Sometimes I stoically sat in the corner of them room, meeting their intrigued gazes head on, saying nothing, doing nothing, and responding to nothing. This was funny to me.
A couple times, I sat down and began making conversation as I would have with one of my students, asking them about their day and how their work was going.
This was funny to me.
One memorable time, I walked up to a woman who was visiting and held out my hand to her. Bewildered, she grasped it. I shook it formally. "Charmed, I'm sure." I told her in a British accent.
This was also funny to me.
Once a troll, always a troll, I suppose.
But now I had finally done something truly unexplainable. I had just completed fifth grade math homework. Fifth grade? Was he in fifth? He's twelve so, one… two.. three… No wait, that would be seventh grade. So, I just completed a worksheet meant for seventh graders. Nothing for me, a graduate student; but they didn't know that.
Let's see how you react to that, Mother.
I stared at her in curiosity. Clark was staring at me, still not taking back his pencil. Mother slowly approached us, around the counter, and straight towards me. She looked me in the eye. "A' Zhong," she said, her voice steady. "Can you read?"
"Yes," I told her. "I can read."
"How?"
I weighed my options. Part of me wanted to just flat out say I was a reincarnator or a transmigrator. Part of me wanted to say something ridiculous like "The man in the moon showed me." But looking at my mother and feeling as though the moment we were held in was somehow fragile, I wanted to give her something a little bit better than that.
"Clark," I said. She looked at Clark, who seemed as though he was ready to have an aneurysm.
"I never showed you how to read!" he said, clutching his math book to his chest.
"Yes, you did." I insisted, stubbornly. "You've always read to me."
"But-but-but" Clark didn't seem to know how to refute that. "You're a baby!"
I frowned at him. "I'm a toddler," I corrected.
My mother gently grasped my chin and turned my face towards her. "Baobei," she said softly. "Will you show me?" I nodded. With that, she picked me up and carried me out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into her wonderful room of books. She picked one from her shelf at random.
I opened it, letting the book fall open in my hands to a random page. "… The funeral was arranged for the next succeeding day, so that Lucy and her mother might be buried together. I attended to all the ghastly formalities, and the urbane undertaker proved that his staff was afflicted, or blessed, with something of his own obsequious suavity." Clever mother, I had thought that she'd chosen at random, but this was at college reading level. She had to have known before she offered it to me. Despite knowing this, I read a passage out to her. Just a few lines, but the lexicon contained in those few lines was probably nothing a toddler had ever uttered before.
It felt freeing, to be perfectly honest. I wanted my mother to understand that I wasn't incapable. I wanted to her give me more freedom, to treat me like I was intelligent. I was sick of being spoken to in broken sentences, as though that were the only way I would be able to understand them. I was sick of being handed baby books and little blocks and soft dolls and other toys big enough that it wasn't a "danger" that I would choke on them. I was sick of being a baby and I was sick of being babied. Looking into her dark eyes, I willed for her to understand what I was capable of. I loved my no-longer-new mother. I wanted to connect with her as intellectuals do.
"Hm," she hummed. "I must tell my Great Grandfather about this," she said gravely. "He'll want to know."
"Know what?" I asked her.
She smiled gently at me, and she pressed a soothing kiss to my brow. "How special you are, A' Zhong."
♡ღ‿ღ♡ ʕ•̫͡•ʕ*̫͡*ʕ•͓͡•ʔ-̫͡-ʕ•̫͡•ʔ*̫͡*ʔ-̫͡-ʔ ♡ღ‿ღ♡
The funniest part of that day was how Samsam was suddenly put under the microscope. My Aunties were watching him like a hawk for the next good while, waiting for him to act like a tiny professor, like I did. I didn't help any. Sometimes, I would act as though he were whispering in my ear, and say something like, "No, Samsam, we can't do that. We'll get in trouble!" Or I'd make eye contact with him from across the room, and then nod, knowingly. This would then give all the adults whiplash as they whipped their heads around to observe Samsam. But, of course, they would never see anything. Because Samsam was actually just a baby.
My mother paid more attention to me as well. At first, I was worried it would become stifling. However, it wasn't. Afterall, there wasn't actually anything that I was doing behind her back aside from sneaking out of my room at night. And my days were so empty that having them be suddenly filled up with her attention was a welcome change. Instead of sitting, working on projects in my room, she'd pick me up and sit on her lap. Sometimes she would be the one to read to me, usually regular novels, but sometimes she would pull out the good stuff.
But my entire life changed when she was reading a Xianxia novel, I don't remember what it was called. Something Something Under the Plum Blossoms, or some such title. It was interesting enough. Nothing too juicy, all very clean. A very basic Adventure/Quest plot structure, set up, and pay off. All and all, a good book, but nothing to write home about.
It was my mother's commentary that changed everything. As we followed the character into the mountain sect where he would learn cultivation at, my mother sighed and put down the novel, looking at me for a few seconds. "You know, A' Zhong," she said to me. "I left China because of my failures there." I stared at her. There might as well have been a loading circle spinning on my forehead. "But try as I might, my spirit veins never opened." Was, was she playing with me? Was she mocking me? "It was a great disappointment to my Great Grandfather. But, well, it's rare enough as it is for cultivators to have family and raise children at all. There has never been a guarantee that the potential of the parents will pass down to the children. It seems that the power and potential in our line has only been diluted with time." She picked up the book again but didn't start reading until she finished the exchange with "But you make me wonder, A' Zhong."
With that, she went back to the story, but my mind was a thousand miles away. Cultivation? Was she joking or was she telling the truth? This was, after all, a story world. But there was no cultivation in "Magical Miracle" or in "Immortal Miracle." In fact, the only place that cultivation was ever mentioned… was…
Tristan's homework. He would rewrite episodes from the story through the lens of a cultivation mindset, with the rules and system of a xianxia novel. I'd thought it was just a more creative spin on the concept of the original. But, if Tristan was the creator, wouldn't that make his work the actual original?
Was I in Tristan's homework?
On one hand, that seemed to be a much better reality than being stuck in "Magical Miracle." On the other, at least I knew that show like the back of my hand. But Tristan's homework, well, I only had him for less than one semester. And our class only met twice a week. We didn't even focus on fiction the entire time, we also delved into nonfiction, poetry, and screenwriting. All in all, he turned in maybe five or six excerpts to me. In addition, Tristan's original web novel only wrote up to the thirty-fourth chapter. And, in the way of web novels, there hadn't been much development by that point. In fact, Samsam had only just received the artifact from the mysterious old master and defeated the first monster, which was referred to as a demon. The web novel hadn't revealed who his new hero partner was, nor much about his family.
It did talk about his cousins, though it had been so many years by this point, I couldn't with any certainty say that the cousins' names were Clark and Huizhong. The main people we'd been introduced to were Samantha and Wilfred, the bully and the class president. The main draw had been the mystery going on – people were disappearing, and there were monster sightings that no one was taking seriously.
No one except Samsam, who being the protagonist, had to take action. That was what had progressed the story. It had been a good story, one that had captured my interest. So then, would this world follow the pattern of Tristan's original writing? His web novel and his homework. If so… what should I expect this world to be?